Stitches
by Alchemine
Summary: Sybbie finds herself in need of a seamstress. Thomas knows that Miss Baxter is just the person to ask. Set sometime during S6, probably.


It's a quiet, rainy Saturday afternoon, and Phyllis Baxter is in the servants' hall, staring down a heap of mending that needs to be done. Mending is an endless task for a lady's maid—it sometimes seems as if Lady Grantham drops a steady stream of buttons everywhere she goes—and if it's not attended to regularly, it piles up and gets out of control. Phyllis works at it as diligently as she can, but there are so many other tasks she would rather do that she finds herself in this position far too often. With a sigh, she picks up the first damaged skirt and turns it over in her hands, searching for the fallen hem she knows is there.

"Miss Baxter?"

Phyllis looks up from the skirt, startled, and finds Thomas standing beside her chair, turned out impeccably in his full livery, and trailed by a young companion: Miss Sybbie, who seems to have temporarily escaped the nanny's watchful eye. She's clutching Thomas's trouser leg with one hand and peering around him like a fox cub hiding behind a tree, so that Phyllis can only see half of her.

"Miss Sybbie wants to ask you a question," Thomas says. He puts his hand on Sybbie's shoulder in its puffed sleeve and urges her forward a little. "Go on. Miss Baxter won't bite you."

Sybbie looks as if she isn't at all sure about that, but she gazes up at Phyllis from underneath her short fringe, blue eyes bright with curiosity, and asks in a small but clear voice, "Can you really sew anything?"

"Well, almost anything," Phyllis says, smiling. "I couldn't sew a motorcar, or a refrigerator."

Sybbie giggles. "What about an elephant?"

"Not a live one, but if it was a stuffed one I could. Why do you ask?"

Suddenly shy again, Sybbie looks down and draws a pattern on the floor with the toe of one shiny black shoe. "Could you sew a dress for Elizabeth?"

"Elizabeth?"

"Elizabeth is Miss Sybbie's doll," Thomas informs her, as if this is common knowledge. "Show her to Miss Baxter, Sybbie."

Obediently, Sybbie hoists the doll into view for Phyllis to admire. It's a large, beautifully made one with sleek brown curls of real hair and glass eyes that open and close, just the sort of doll that Phyllis herself would have yearned over in shop windows as a child. She wonders if Sybbie knows what a lucky little girl she is. With Mr Branson as a father, she thinks, the odds of that are probably better than they would be for most children in Sybbie's position.

"Hello, Elizabeth," she says, and Sybbie smiles, pleased, and makes one of the doll's dimpled china hands wave to her. "I'm told you're in need of a new dress."

"I want it to be like my Christmas one," Sybbie explains, becoming more voluble as she warms to her subject. "It's red velvet with a white collar that goes like this." She tucks Elizabeth under one arm and uses her fingers to describe the shape of a Peter Pan collar across her own neck. "And it has pearl buttons down the back and more white around the bottom. Nanny says there isn't a dress like that to fit Elizabeth, but Mr Barrow said you can sew anything, and you might make one for her if I asked nicely. Have I?"

"Yes, you have. Hasn't she, Miss Baxter?" Thomas raises his eyebrows meaningfully at Phyllis, as if urging her to agree, and she nods and turns back to Sybbie.

"Of course, I'll be happy to sew Elizabeth a dress. We'll have to see if I have the right sort of velvet, though. Perhaps you'll help me look through my scrap basket?"

"Yes!" Sybbie thrusts the doll into Thomas's hands, and he takes it with an expression of resigned amusement. "Stay with Mr Barrow, Elizabeth. Miss Baxter and I have to look for something."

Phyllis is fairly certain she has a suitable piece of red velvet, but it's still a relief to find it at the bottom of the basket. She would have hated to disappoint Sybbie, and anyway she is rather looking forward to making a doll's dress to postpone the dreaded mending a little longer. She lets Sybbie carry the velvet back to the servants' hall, a task the little girl takes very seriously, and then measures the doll swiftly and starts pinning and cutting fabric while Thomas picks Sybbie up and sits her in a chair to watch.

"How do you know what to do?" Sybbie folds her arms on the scrubbed and polished tabletop and rests her chin on them, watching avidly as Phyllis's scissor blades flash in and out of the velvet.

Phyllis takes a pearl-headed pin from her mouth. "My mother started teaching me to sew when I was your age. Maybe even a bit younger than you."

"I don't have a mother," Sybbie says. "She died when I was born."

"I know," Phyllis says. She steals a glance at the child's face to see if comfort is needed, but Sybbie seems simply to be reporting the facts of her life as she understands them. "I'm sorry."

"Mr Barrow says she was nice. Was she?"

"I'm afraid I didn't know her myself," Phyllis says, "but if Mr Barrow says she was nice, then you can be certain she was."

"Was your mummy nice?"

"Yes," Phyllis says. "She was cross sometimes because she had lots of work to do and was tired, but she was very kind." To her alarm, she finds she is near tears at the thought of her mother, who has been dead for fifteen years. She looks up at Thomas over Sybbie's head, pleading with her eyes for him to change the subject, and Thomas cuts in.

"Why don't you put Elizabeth on the table, Miss Sybbie? Then she can see her new dress being made."

"All right," Sybbie says cheerfully. She lifts the doll from her lap, rearranges its jointed limbs and seats it on the table facing Phyllis. "See, Elizabeth? Miss Baxter is sewing your dress for you. It's going to be just like mine. We'll be twins."

"You'll look lovely," Phyllis says. She's hand-basting the seams of the tiny dress, needle flying. "I'll finish it with my sewing machine, and then we'll put on the collar and trim and it'll be all ready for her to wear."

"Will you help me with her buttons?" Sybbie looks hopeful. "It's hard to do them up. Nanny does mine for me."

"Yes, of course. Just a few more minutes." Phyllis glances up at Thomas and finds him watching this exchange with a softer, more vulnerable expression on his face than she's seen him wear in a long time. She wishes the moment could last, but he catches her looking and frowns, and she hastily turns her attention back to the project at hand.

The sewing machine makes quick work of the remaining seams, and soon enough she's snipping the last few ends of thread around the buttons and holding up the finished product for Sybbie to approve. They dress Elizabeth in it together, straightening her miniature white stockings and smoothing out her curls as they go, and Phyllis folds up the old, discarded dress and hands it to Thomas, who tucks it into his pocket.

"Say thank you to Miss Baxter," Thomas says, and Sybbie, clearly used to being prompted in this way, turns to Phyllis and says "Thank you very much, Miss Baxter." She holds the doll up, resplendent in its new finery. "Elizabeth says thank you too."

"You're both very welcome," Phyllis says, and is surprised and touched when Sybbie unexpectedly stretches up on tiptoes and puts a rather damp, noisy kiss on her cheek.

"All right, little miss," Thomas says, "it's time for me to take you and Elizabeth back upstairs before Nanny comes and gives me a good smacking."

Sybbie giggles and reaches out to him trustingly, Elizabeth dangling from one hand. "Will you carry us there? We're tired."

"Of course," Thomas says, and swoops child and doll into the crook of his arm. "But we'll have to run, because I really am frightened of Nanny."

He looks back at Phyllis over his shoulder and mouths _Thanks_ , then to Sybbie says "Hold on tight," and charges out of the room to the sound of Sybbie's delighted shrieks and laughter. Phyllis watches them go, thinking what a terrible injustice it is that when so many people have children they don't want or love, a man like Thomas who is really fond of children will never have any of his own.

 _If I could change the world for you, I would,_ she thinks.

Sighing again, but this time not because of the mending, she picks up the skirt she abandoned and bends over it to start work.


End file.
